Sweet Tooth
By Kate Hopkins
Hardcover, 312 pages ($25.99)
“We’ve had a love affair with sweet foods since before the age of agriculture,” writes the author as she begins her globetrotting quest to track down the roots of our deep-rooted appetite for sweet treats. Subtitled “The Bittersweet History of Candy,” this fascinating, fact-filled and fun first-person account traces the lineage of our confectionaries back through a colorful, often surprising trail of not-always-sugar-coated facts about ancient medicine, medieval royalty and the African slave trade, up through the candy industry’s modern incarnation as a cutthroat, billion-dollar empire.